Lurkers v. Commenters

~ Laura

A recent study finds that 90% of participators in online communities are lurkers. Only 1% are heavy contributors.

Are you a lurker or a heavy contributer?

I’m working on a paper on differences in online use. If Halloween doesn’t eat up the next two days, I’m going to get back to it. Meanwhile, here’s a great paper by Eszter.

Published by Laura

10 thoughts on “Lurkers v. Commenters”

  1. Your question illustrates Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in a different context. Anybody who chimes in that they are a lurker ceases to be a lurker.

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  2. RSS feeds have turned me into more of a lurker than I used to be. Of course, I used to moderate in several online communities, so I was perforce very active in those. Now with blogs being served up on feed and the short snippets offered up by twitter, it takes more effort to really converse as opposed to just posting in isolation.
    Thanks for the link to Ezster’s article: I was bemused to note that I’m only a member of two of the studies SNS and I rarely log into either of those!

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  3. I generally lurk at most blogs, not counting LJ. This is the only one I really comment on, though lately I have dipped my toes into the water a bit.
    However, I am a member of LJ and comment/post there a lot. But it’s different when you’re commenting on what people are saying about tv shows. 🙂 “Yeah, House was really good last night. Can you believe what happened with Cuddy?”

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  4. I read many more blogs than I post at–it’s easily a 90/10 relationship, if not 95/5. I’m religious about reading thehousingbubbleblog.com every night, but I can go half a year without commenting. The guys and gals there know a lot more about housing and finance than I do, so I only pipe up if some narrow issue is being discussed that I have personal information on (like a neighborhood or a city that I’ve lived in in the past that other people want to know more about). Mainly, I just soak up information–past market history, current market news, income-to-mortgage ratio, construction flaws and maintenance issues, the need for a real estate lawyer and being wary of last minute loan-switcheroos, etc. There’s a certain number of off-the-grid wannabe semi-survivalists, conspiracy-theorists and gold bugs at HBB, but interestingly, they were a lot louder before the recent economic unpleasantness than they are right now. I just keep reading and learning. Reading a dozen tales of housing woe a night keeps me from rushing out and buying an adorable 1920s cottage that we can’t afford right now, but will be able to in a couple of years.

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  5. I lurk often, but am not afraid to put my two (or more) cents in when I know something about the topic or have a strong reaction to what I read.

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  7. My pattern is a lot like AmyP’s – there are a good number of blogs I read, only a few where I often make remarks.

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  8. I am a lurker generally. I do not have time to even update my own blog as much as I would like. Commenting on other people’s blogs is a luxury I can only afford once in a while.

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